It’s easier to believe when missiles are the only strategy being used in the war…

It’s a clickbait article

The word you are looking for is "stragedy"

Hold on, there's strategy being used in the war?

It's easy to believe, it's hard to realize.

The conflict with Iran is only 'minor' in certain respects, it's a major air campaign otherwise, involving strategic bombing on par with the Iraq War 2 - or at least the initial period.

The US is bombing them from very far away places, the amount of logistical overhead is unthinkable.

These munitions cost a fortune in part because they are purchased in lower quantities, and yes, they have to be able to do a 10x-50x instant ramp up in order to be effective (aka capacity not inventory which is the strategic key).

It takes 2 years minimum to adjust an economy in that way and the US does not have good supply chains.

It's unlikely the US could hope to fight any kind of prolonged conflict with China 'in the area of Chinese territory' for very obvious reasons: they have the supply chains, 1 billion workers, and can turn them on a dime, and don't have 'far to go' to deploy weapons.

The US doesn't even have reliable ways of getting goods and materials into the theatre and has limited quantities of everything.

That said, there are still ways to defend Taiwan and/or to make an invasion futile - but 'broad conflict' ... nope.

> The US doesn't even have reliable ways of getting goods and materials into the theatre and has limited quantities of everything.

This is not true. US is known for the best logistics in the world.

US has 600 air refuelling aircraft and 40 naval supply ships.

US power is mostly strategic, it's 'Air Based' which gives the kind of instant leverage leaders like. It's 'Aircraft Carrier Based'.

The US doesn't have that same overwhelming ability otherwise.

You can't quite an Army overseas - it takes a different kind of logistics esp. in Pacific, one the US doesn't quite have the level of sophistication.

Don't get me wrong - 'it could' but would take a while to ramp up.

I believe GP was being sarcastic.

I was not

Then I’d stop at claiming “best” is meaningless in a military context without defining what the mission is. If it is starting wars, I’d say it’s great. If it means achieving goals, then it’s kind of meh.

In terms of logistics ? US is the best ever conceived in the history of mankind.

Generals say it’s logistics that win wars. The US record in winning wars is simply terrible.

US hasn’t lost a war yet.

US also has a large strategic-sealift force: dozens of RO/RO ships, commercial shipping agreements and prepositioned Army equipment in the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

It can move man and materiel anywhere it pleases and fast.

It's ok though - the US Forces do have 'the best logistics in the world' - that's not an unfair claim at all.

They are exceedingly exceptional.

But all of these systems have limits and characterizations.

US would be hard pressed to keep 500K people full supplied and engaged in Pacific. It would take a while to ramp that up.

Sure, every logistics system has limits. But “it would take time to ramp up” isn’t the same as “the US can’t do it.”

Never underestimate how much damage a single high-ranked idiot can inflict on its own ranks.

That would be true if the money spent was actually optimized on output rather than expensive contractors, consultants, and third party profits. :(

never underestimate the monetary inefficiency of the military industrial complex

And useless, prolonged wars are good for business.

America could theretically sustain other cheaper losses, like a few more F15s going down - but Trump is rightfully terrified of the political fallout of American pilots being capturred and torture videos showing up on Telegram.

They are not cheaper losses, because production capacity for those things is very limited.

Missiles are always easier to replace then platforms of any kind.

But yes - a single, lone captive could cause political devastation.

Im no military planner so Im not gonna get invested in this debate haha - and obviously a human death is a huge loss - but presumably you could drop a lot of bombs for each lost fighter, so the bang/buck (literally) would be better than with missiles.

Planes aircrew high fixed/operating cost - lower unit costs on strikes.

Missiles, more expensive - depending on.

Missiles are not 'rocket science' - pun intended. They're expensive because of the overhead of military industrial complex.

Russia is making ballistic missiles 'China style' - super fast, super cheap. Basically - much bigger than ATACMs, longer range, a bit less precise but vicious. Similar to Iran.

Paper tiger.

Venezuela thought the same thing. Keeping a full-scale deployment at arm's length, and 'only' targeting military targets with exhaustive use of precision missiles is poor strategy, but if a military victory were the US's only ambition the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.

Doctrine isn't the same as inability.

>if a military victory were the US's only ambition the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.

I read this and I wonder, "are we back to 2003 and Iraq?"

Incredible how little memory Americans have. Absolutely none. You just have no grasps on reality.

Venezuela was likely a palace coup disguised as a purely foreign intervention by both parties involved. There is a reason why instead of holding an election or having the opposition take over, they just handed the country to Maduro's very own vice president.

>the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.

This is a laughable amount of ignorance. The capability that Iran has to prevent this is physics

Iran is gigantic. Iran has 90 million people.

If you put together every long range precision munition the US has ever built, you could attack a single City and severely damage it.

People have zero sense of scale. To level cities the way we did in WW2 requires the level of industrial output that we had in WW2, because we have literally not made enough explosives to do so since

The US dropped 1.4 million tons of bombs on Germany alone in WW2

That's the equivalent of 3 million Tomahawk missiles. The US has built less than 10k total

Speaking of laughable ignorance, what other munitions does the US military have besides precision munitions if precision is no longer a concern?

Don’t worry, they can still carpet bomb with high explosive and nuclear always remains an option lest you forget.

The US bombed North Vietnam into dust, but because they didn’t occupy it with ground forces they simply rebuilt and kept coming.

You can’t win a war with just air power.

The US does not have enough B52s and Mk 80s to carpet bomb a place the size of Iran.

We barely managed it during Vietnam using depleting surplus and losing many irreplaceable airframes.

"Carpet bombing Iran to rubble" literally is not an option

You wouldn’t level the entire country, Tehran is a massive target with a handful of other major centres. Comparisons to Vietnam forget the fact that Iran is very arid and highly dependent on infrastructure for water and energy. No power, water or fuel would cripple them and also collapse their agricultural capacity.

In some ways yes, not in others.

That is a remarkably stupid thing to say about the US military.

"Minor" conflict? You really don't realize how much ressources Hesgeth has committed to this, and how much your president likes to make things go "boom".

See also: the number of strikes on boats in the Caribbean (with absolutely no result on drug trafficking).

For US, major conflict would be with China, perhaps with Russia. Not with Iran.

edit: this is the document I am talking about http://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022...

It seems like the US has priced itself out of those wars.

Missiles (BIG EXPLOSION) look better when presented in video briefings to Trump and as propaganda on Fox news. It's all optics and style. No other goals.

The article specifically mentions shortages of U.S. Army stockpiles of specifically ATACMS and PrSM weapons. Do keep in mind that other types of missile systems exist and other branches of the military besides the Army exist as well.

Great video about this article from a political science / game theory professor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-ewrIenEbo